It's a neat idea for a deck builder card game with cyberpunk narrative, but the balance is just too awful to enjoy. Short version: going 2nd is a crippling disadvantage, not taking simultaneous damage is a mistake, and getting better cards takes far too long.
Mostly, it's that it has no idea how tempo works, and the reasons other card games do what they do to create a fair experience. Winning the coin flip for 1st turn is a MASSIVE advantage, because you get to place minions first and are always 1 mana/resource point ahead. In a game like Hearthstone, the 2nd place player gets one extra card plus a card that gives 1 mana so they get one turn of being on parity with the 1st player. Despite this, going 2nd in Hearthstone is still a significant disadvantage.
System Crash 2nd player? Gets an extra card and that's it. An already significant disadvantage in other card games turns into a MASSIVE one here. It's to the point where you might as well keep restarting a match until you go 1st, because going 2nd is a waste of time and will result in a loss the large majority of the time.
Compounding that is that attacking minions take no return damage when hitting an enemy minions; they only dish out damage. So going 1st gets yet another advantage of not only being 1 mana ahead all game, but one attack round of free damage as well. This also makes the haste/charge ability (attack the same turn a minion is played) super overpowered since it's a free hit. In Hearthstone, not only does the charging unit still take return damage, but its stats are weaker than a typical non-charge unit of the same cost. System Crash? All the haste/charge minions are the same stats as non-haste units. Nobody balanced this.
Then there's the way targeting works. Instead of any minion being able to target anyone, they are divided into 4 rows and only attack the minion in the same row. What makes this a problem is the VERY widespread "hacking" ability, which automatically fills up your victory points every turn the minion simply exists. Just plunk down your hacking minions across from the lowest damage enemy minions and you're almost untouchable as you rake in free victory points every turn. Try to get around this, and there are still cards that grant the hacking ability to ANY unit. The hacking units also aren't that fragile even if you do hit them.
So just build a good deck on these terms? That's the final nail in the coffin. Getting new cards is GLACIALLY slow. To the point that it feels like this started as a free to play pricing model designed to push you towards spending real money to skip the grind, but at the least minute made it a paid commercial game. Do you want to grind out 40 matches for a single good card? I sure don't. Worse, there are a lot of themed cards that show how rushed and unfinished the game is, because for every themed group that gives bonuses for every matching themed minion, there are only ever 3-5 cards in that group in the ENTIRE game. Trying out any themed deck means doing the above grind 3-5 times. Think that sounds fun? I sure don't.
Finally, while there's no direct proof that the computer cheats, it seems to ALWAYS have good cards to play every turn. Out of the nearly one hundred matches I played, I think the computer had ONE turn where it couldn't play anything. I suspect that its "hand" of cards is a lie, and that it simply has access to its entire deck to play one every turn. It will always have good low cost cards to play in the early turns, and high cost cards to play in later turns. That's not simply good deck construction. Even the best decks will whiff on a draw from time to time. To only whiff ONCE out of 600-700 turns? There's something fishy going on. And it would be one thing if the game got this difficult in the later campaign missions, but it's like this from the THIRD mission. Immediately after the two tutorial missions, you're thrown into the cheating deep end.
I really wanted to like this for the setting and narrative too. But dang it all feels like a cargo cult understanding of card game design.
